competing perspectives

i am reading a deliciously well-written book about the brain right now. i first really took note of Jeff Hawkins when he lectured at the Congregation of All Neuroscientists in san diego this past fall. at the conference, he discussed the framework outlined in On Intelligence, which I impulse-bought a couple of weeks ago when picking up the text for my research ethics course. in his prologue, he raises several excellent points. among them:

... I refused to study the problem of intelligence as others have before me. I believe the best way to solve this problem is to use the detailed biology of the brain as a constraint and as a guide, yet think about intelligence as a computational problem--a position somewhere between biology and computer science. Many biologists tend to reject or ignore the idea of thinking of the brain in computational terms, and computer scientists often don't believe they have anything to learn from biology.

setting up camp on the fringes between disciplines has always appealed to me. serving as a bridge. a hybrid.